Category: News & Events

James Reaney’s thoughts on putting on your own version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass:

Is There Life After Alice? That is, after you’ve seen the show, what do you do when you get home? … Once when I was eight, I had a parallel experience to the one you may have just had, of watching a professional production, authentically acted with exuberance and supported by sophisticated design and fabulous illusions and compelling direction. My theatrical experience wasn’t a play though. In those days, Stratford was not as lucky as it is nowadays, but what it was was my very first circus — Ringling Brothers — an absolutely enthralling show, unforgettably enchanting. The only reaction you could have was to go home and put on your own circus, in this case with my cousins and whatever the farm could muster. Cows as elephants? Of course, you couldn’t rival the production you had just seen, but what you could do was with your own simplicity rival its feeling, and the attempt turned me into an artist. I don’t see this as an improbable effect of the show you have just seen and I hope that the various first steps I have described in paralleling its effects and impacts may lead some of you to a lasting love of theatre and art…

—From Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass: Adapted for the stage by James Reaney, pages 133 and 141.

Jillian Keiley’s new production of Alice Through the Looking-Glass continues this summer at the Stratford Festival, May 31 to October 12. To buy tickets, contact the box office at 1.800.567.1600 or visit stratfordfestival.ca

Previews for the new production of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass, adapted for the stage by James Reaney, began earlier this month at the Stratford Festival. Director Jillian Keiley and designer Bretta Gerecke promise a lavish, child-inspired production:

“As children take inspiration from their own lives, Bretta and I have planned a world as created by the child Alice – full of bicycles and toy wagons, kites and chessboards,” says Ms Keiley. “But since this world is through the looking-glass, bicycles have giant trees growing out of the handlebars, red toy wagons inspire a flotilla for the Queen’s entrance, and the kings and queens of chessboards join all the characters from Alice’s mounds of books. Our goal is to tap into that wonderful world of seven-year-olds, where anything is not only possible but likely, and the only thing you can reasonably expect is the unexpected.”

The show runs May 31 to October 12 at the Avon Theatre in Stratford, Ontario. For tickets, contact the box office at 1.800.567.1600 or visit stratfordfestival.ca

For a tantalizing glimpse of the production, see the “Alice Through the Looking-Glass” preview on YouTube.

Update June 2: What reviewers are saying: “Lufrednow. Or, from the other side of the looking glass: wonderful.” — Laura Cudworth in The Beacon Herald
“This smashing production of Alice Through the Looking-Glass truly deserves it. If you don’t know a child, rent one for the afternoon and go see this show.” — Richard Ouzounian, The Toronto Star

For more about the Alice opening show, see JBNBlog.

“Alice” events at the Stratford Festival Forum

Several Forum events and activities offer a chance to explore Alice Through the Looking-Glass, including Alice Adventure Lunches, a themed meal and activity to ignite your child’s imagination before the magic unfolds on stage; Adapting Alice, a panel discussion including Jillian Keiley and Peter Hinton, playwright for the Shaw Festival; and Acting Up: Alice, a drama workshop in which 8- to 10-year-olds use costumes to explore scenes and characters from the play.

Alice Through the Looking-Glass is a Schulich Children’s Play presentation and produced in association with Canada’s National Arts Centre.

At the May 5, 2014 preview performance of Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Chris Spaleta from Seaforth, Ontario was presented with a lifetime pass for two for being the Stratford Festival’s 26 millionth patron! 

This spring the Stratford Festival will present James Reaney’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass at the Avon Theatre in Stratford, Ontario.

Alice will be directed by Jillian Keiley, an award-winning director from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Cast members include Trish Lindström as Alice, Cynthia Dale as the Red Queen, Dion Johnstone as the White King, Tom McCamus as the March Hare, and Brian Tree as Humpty Dumpty.

To purchase tickets, call 1-800-567-1600 or order online here.

Notes on James Reaney’s adaptation

In 1991, David William, then Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival, commissioned James Reaney to adapt Alice Through the Looking-Glass for the stage.  James Reaney recalls the many months writing and rewriting the play and attending workshops:

“So, as the preparatory workshop with the Young Company started in the fall of 1992, my adaptation had pretty well shaken down into its present shape except that a great deal of my commentary and suggestions were kept as part of the rehearsed reading shown to Richard Monette and David William and invited guests so that I myself actually read my mental landscapes of Looking-glass in fear and trembling since the many rewrites and keeping this and dropping that produced landmines for cues […]

Mr Monette took to the story as played that night in late October and also to its trajectory away from the Third Stage to the Avon with a cast [that included] Douglas Rain as Humpty and Barbara Bryne as the White Queen, both actors who had in 1967 appeared in my first Stratford play, Colours in the Dark.”

—From the Foreword to Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass: adapted for the stage by James Reaney, pages 12-14, The Porcupine’s Quill, 1994.

James Reaney’s adaptation of Alice Through the Looking-Glass premiered at the Stratford Festival in 1994 and was revived in 1996. The play is available in Reaney Days in the West Room: Plays of James Reaney, David Ferry, ed., Playwrights Canada Press, 2008.

On May 24 to June 1 in London, Ontario, come and see the AlvegoRoot Theatre Company’s presentation of James Reaney’s play The Easter Egg.

The Easter Egg is directed by Jason Rip, and the performers are Kim Kaitell, Adam Corrigan Holowitz, Maya Wong, Demis Odanga, and Chris McAuley.

Jason Rip is a former student of James Reaney’s and an admirer of his work: “I feel very fortunate to have known Mr. Reaney. My ideas about him and his unique way of looking at the world — alternately whimsical and threatening, dignified yet naughty, with an emphasis on the importance of play — have infused this production. I still remember him hiding behind the curtains in University College Tower, waiting to pounce out and scare students. ‘GOTHIC NOVEL!’ he’d shout before doubling over with giggles. James Reaney is the bard of Souwesto. I will never turn down a chance to direct or appear in his work.”

When: May 24, 25, 29, 30, 31 and June 1 at 8pm; May 25 and June 1 at 2 pm
Where: The Arts Project, 203 Dundas Street, London, Ontario

To buy tickets, call 519-642-2767; Adults $15, Students and Seniors $10.

Pamela Terry Beckwith (1926-2006) directed James Reaney’s The Killdeer in 1960. He always referred to her as “my first director,” and he dedicated his second play, The Easter Egg, to her. She directed the first production of The Easter Egg for the Alumnae Theatre in November 1962.

Here are James Reaney’s thoughts about The Easter Egg from the Preface to the anthology Masks of Childhood (New Press, 1972, pages v-vi):

Behind Easter Egg literally lies a collection of glass Easter eggs I made from 1945 to 1955, aet. 19 and over. Found my first one in a store on Harbord Street, an old grocery and sundries store out of the 1910 era.[…] In Stratford, Le Souder’s Second Hand Store also kept getting a supply as attics from the eighties and nineties descended to the auctioneer’s gavel. Have never been quite sure of their cultural use; I think they were given to children at Easter. Some of them are as small as hen’s eggs and I have heard of these being used as nest eggs; others are large — a bit larger than a goose egg. Could they have been made at the Hamilton Glass Works? […] Milk glass blown or moulded, painted with flowers, rabbits, chickens (a cherub hatching out of one I didn’t buy), glowing with trapped pearly light — such glass cannot fail to set the story-telling instinct free. So a godmother gives a boy a glass Easter egg; he is drowning in an evil world and the present could float him to a shore. Someone steals the egg and the boy goes under a wave of word-blindness and numbness. Fourteen years later the Easter egg is found again and….

Bethel and her setting were suggested by stories told at an academic party in Kingston; stories about the past on a campus somewhat farther east. Nearby Garden Island supplied the ghost story of a girl tied to a fence for stealing a twig of small fruit. To my astonishment I ran across the basic for the story in the London Times,* 9 October, 1846 (No. 84). I think the heading is ‘Gooseberry Case on Garden Island’ and the owner of the gooseberries had the child brought up in court for stealing one! Confinement beneath a cellar door rather than tying to a fence was the cruelty practised.[…] I know perfectly well that in real life no one marries somebody because she got him to kill a bat; but here, in this story, they do you see.

*[London, Ontario, or London Minor as it was sometimes called.]